Some new contract brewing: Gold Ale bottled for Brew Thru and OBX stores in the Outer Banks of North Carolina; dry-hopped Oxford Class available under a house label at John Stevens in Baltimore's Fells Point; Blue Point, a soon-to-come Long Island based brewer; and, DuClaw, for a new venue that I think will be closer to Baltimore than their Bel Air location.

The highlight of the tour, naturally, was sampling the beers on tap:

• Clipper City Reserve Winter Ale lives up to Hugh Sisson's promise of "a huge beer, deep amber, bronze in color, with alcohol by volume in excess of 6%, and more hops than any other beer we make." (I haven't had a chance to try the bottle conditioned version, or the just-returned Clipper City Porter.)
• Ipswich IPA, contract-brewed for Ipswich Brewing of Massachusetts, is a nice, mildly-hopped ale (Clipper City Reserve IPA is more hoppy).
• Clipper City Chesapeake Gold Ale and Clipper City Chesapeake Lager are good versions of more mass-market styles.

Clipper City Chesapeake Amber Ale is the same as Oxford Class Ale. Clipper City Chesapeake Gold Ale has also been available this year as "KML Ale" as part of a local radio station promotion. Matt may have said (or I may have misunderstood) that Clipper City Chesapeake Lager is the same beer that is contract-brewed for The Weeping Radish in North Carolina to be their Corolla Gold.

"The Raven" lager, contract-brewed for Baltimore-Washington Beer Works and available locally, may not be brewed again. Though Matt (and Hugh, previously) spoke well of its quality, the one-man operation has had distributor and marketing problems.

I guess Lew "Pennsylvania Breweries" Bryson heard the same thing from Hugh that I did on an earlier visit: Clipper City's seasonal Maibock won't be brewed anymore because of low sales. "People didn't know what it was," Hugh said.